Response to Intervention

Response to Intervention

Exeter Unified Preschool believes all students can learn. We are a fully inclusive program which is focused on the premise that early intervention is effective and remediating learning deficits and identifying strategies to offset the impact of education delays in young children. The program is rich in language, social skills, motor skills, self help skills and other adaptive skills necessary to be successful in the educational setting.  The program works closely with our speech-language pathologist, resource specialist and occupational and physical therapist to make sure every day, all day, is beneficial to the needs of all of our students. The learning environment is rich with vocabulary, motor activities, social interactions and early literacy skills.

Enrollment in the program does not require an Individualized Education Plan.  Sometimes, students transition from Bright Start and have an IFSP.  The team will meet with the families and the service providers and decide one of two things:

1. The student absolutely has a disability that will not be remediated with early intervention. The student requires an assessment and an IEP. 
2. The student will benefit from daily exposure to same-age peers in a language-rich environment. The team wants time to provide this enrichment and structure before deciding that an IEP is necessary. These students will be enrolled in the language-rich program and the team will meet every 8 weeks to determine whether adequate progress is being made.  If progress is happening - yay! We continue with the good work.  If the student is struggling, at any time, we can decide to do an evaluation. 

This enrichment model follows the State guidelines to provide general education intervention and instruction before determining that a student has a disability.  In addition, we are in a crazy world right now.  With the isolation our preschoolers experienced with COVID we must be very careful and not decide if a student who has suffered from lack of social interaction has a disability, when in fact, they just need to join our program and have some fun with their friends. 

From an IFSP to Preschool: don’t fear. Your Bright Start case manager will arrange a meeting with the preschool special services team when your student is 2.6 years old.  By age 3, we will be ready to serve your child.  Enrollment requirements are the same for all.

If you don’t want to attend our Preschool Program but your child needs special education services, such as speech:

1. Call the preschool office and schedule an intake appointment.  Our team will meet with you and your child so we can discuss next steps
2. If the team recommends an assessment, the child must be enrolled for an assessment (not in our program) for our team to assess. 
3. Please view pre-enrollment steps by reading the Pre-enrolling for Assessment  flier at the side of this page.

There is no need to enroll in our program- we can still help your child!